Hard-hitting veteran reporter Deuce Mora is awakened in the pre-dawn hours and called to the scene of a gruesome hanging to identify the body of a dear friend, an FBI agent on the verge of taking down one of Chicago's biggest Mob operations. Deuce knows it's murder, but the authorities have . And with that, author Heller, a former journalist and frequent Pulitzer nominee, takes her place with Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the great Edgar Allan Poe himself as . In this one, half the fun is trying to figure out the locked-room puzzle. And the delight of finding one in a contemporary mob mystery. The other half, of course, is the tenacious Deuce herself, the tough, hard-boiled, and ever-human reporter who goes places the cops don't even know about. And Heller's The ill wind sweeping the Windy City has also whipped up two more unexplainable deaths - of perfectly healthy, able-bodied young mobsters, . Neither the Chicago police nor the FBI can come up with a cause of death - and they've looked at every kind of toxin - but our meticulous investigator, whose stock-in-trade is death-defying leaps of logic, fits together a couple of impossible puzzle pieces. The downside is that the bad guys figure out where their greatest exposure lies - and Deuce quickly becomes their new target. Enter a Washington reporter who has been following the organized crime investigation for months at its source, in D.C. He and Deuce share a dark secret and he knows exactly where to apply pressure on her demons to keep her on the trail of her friend's murderers. But as , Deuce discovers she couldn't walk away even if she wanted to. Whoever is at the top - and this is Chicago, so the top is always up - will stop at nothing to shut down this investigation.